Academy Awards 2018: The triumph of 'The Shape of Water'

So there we go! It all seemed so staid this year given the fact that just 12 months ago we were still gasping over envelope-gate and the fact that a tiny budgeted film about the life of a black gay man won the Oscar for best picture.

But still, despite some seeing it as the “safe” option, The Shape of Water is hardly Oscarbait. It’s a film about a mute woman, an older gay man and a black woman working together to help save an aquatic creature in the 60s. Oh and it features an interspecies sex scene. Not exactly a Lasse Hallström joint huh?

The acting categories were a lot more predictable but as many have already said, all four actors are great, just maybe not in those roles?

The ceremony itself was mixed. There were less desperate attempts to go viral but Kimmel was nothing more then reliable. It was also, despite what they might want you to think, a poor year for female winners with just six women taking home Oscars.

There’ll be more post-show analysis coming soon but for now, this is your lot. Happy Oscars!Guillermo del Toro wins Best Director and Best Picture Oscar for The Shape of Water

Sunday night at the 90th annual Academy Awards, Guillermo del Toro’s swoony merman fantasy The Shape of Water took home the awards for Best Directing and Best Picture. Previously in the evening, the film also won for Original Score and Production Design. The film’s four wins came out of a slate of 13 overall nominations for the film.

Guillermo del Toro

In his Best Directing acceptance speech, the Mexico-born filmmaker followed the lead of many other winners, immediately pivoting to issues of diversity and inclusion. “I am an immigrant,” he said, name-checking Salma Hayek, Gael García Bernal, and several other Mexican artists who were present in the room. “And in the last 25 years, I’ve been living in a country all of our own. Part of it is here, part of it is in Europe, part of it is everywhere. Because I think the greatest thing that art does, and that our industry does, is erase the lines in the sand when the world tells us to make them deeper.”

It was a particularly appropriate sentiment for The Shape of Water, a film that focuses on the fear and alienation some can feel when faced with people and things they may not understand. In del Toro’s film, it’s personified by the remarkable hate — and improbable love — that a merman encounters when he’s pulled into a Baltimore lab to be studied.

In his Best Picture acceptance speech — which he made as producer of the film, rather than as its writer and director — del Toro was briefer and punchier. He spoke briefly about growing up in Mexico watching foreign films, and about adding his own legacy to the legacy of the filmmakers he admired. He also suggested The Shape of Water could be seen as an example to other filmmakers, proving that genre fantasy can be used to address real-world issues and controversies. “This is a door,” he concluded. “Kick it open and come in.”

The celebrated filmmaker had previously been nominated for his 2007 film Pan’s Labyrinth. This year’s crop of nominees for Best Director included several other similarly heralded Hollywood favorites, as well as a pair of disruptive upstarts. Christopher Nolan was nominated for his work on Dunkirk, while Paul Thomas Anderson received a nomination for his period drama Phantom Thread.

In the Best Picture category, nine films were nominated, and Shape of Water beat out other winners from earlier in the night, including Call My By Your Name, Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, Get Out, Phantom Thread, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Two other Best Picture nominees, Lady Bird and The Post, went home without any wins.

Lady Bird was a particular surprise since the most intense 2018 Oscar speculation came around the two first-time feature directors nominated in various categories this year. Writer-director Greta Gerwig was nominated for Lady Bird, making her only the fifth woman in Oscar history to receive a Best Director nomination, while first-time director Jordan Peele, known for his work on the racially frank Comedy Central sketch show Key & Peele, was also nominated for his subversive horror-comedy Get Out. Peele won the Oscar for original screenplay for Get Out earlier in the evening.`